Searching TC with Spotlight

I am trying to find two files on my MacBookPro and on my MacPro and I am totally stumped as to why I can't find them. I've tried a search for a word in the text and just can't find these two files.
I would like to search Time Capsule in some way that allows me to see where and when these files existed previously because I suspect a large amount of other data that was likely in the same folders is also missing.
Is there an intelligent way to do this without clicking on a date and searching through that date and then doing this again.
Also, /if/ this is in fact the only way to search TC should I simply do the same Spotlight search for that date that I have been doing on my two Hard Drives? I mean this is going to be the most effective way to solve this yes?
Thanks.

I got the tipp from another forum:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050514182520714
there it is described how to add other text files. (It requires developer tools).
However, I don't find it that easy as it should be and I really miss advanced search options.
regards

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Search DVDs with spotlight?

Hi. I have a bunch of dvds with tons of backed up files on them. Is there a program that will enable spotlight to index the dvds so that I can search for files on the discs (without them being inserted), spotlight will find it and be able to tell me what disc its on?

Hi, Greg.
Spotlight does not index CDs, DVDs, or network-attached volumes. It indexes locally-attached hard drives and DVD-RAM discs. See my "Stop Spotlight Indexing" FAQ.
CDs and DVDs are not indexed since the Spotlight index for a volume is written to the root level of the volume itself and updated there as the contents of the volume change. CDs and DVDs must be burned to write contents to them, after which the contents are fixed, except in the case of RW media, where you have to erase the disc before one can again burn content to it.
However, an individual CD or DVD can be searched using Spotlight or Find (Finder > Command-F, which is implemented in Spotlight), as long as you restrict the search criteria to file system metadata, e.g. file names, dates, etc. These types of searches actually rely on information saved in the disc's file system directory, not an index.
Some other options for cataloging CDs and DVDs include CDFinder and DiskTracker. You can investigate other solutions by searching MacUpdate or Version Tracker. The user-submitted reviews accompanying the listings can be helpful in sorting the wheat from the chaff.
Good luck!
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:
I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

Searching Textfiles with Spotlight

Hello,
I'am a bit frustrated about spotlight.
Does anyone has an Idea how I could search for the content of my text files? I think of all my .php, .inc etc. Files in the Websites Directory.
thanks in advance,
Wolfi

I got the tipp from another forum:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050514182520714
there it is described how to add other text files. (It requires developer tools).
However, I don't find it that easy as it should be and I really miss advanced search options.
regards

Finding directory content size with Spotlight.

Ok, I know how to do this in terminal. But I've been attempting to "gui-ize" myself more and try to explore the power of spotlight.
Problem:
Find all directories in my Home folder whose contents exceed 500mb.
I tried using two conditions:
Kind: Folder
Size: Greater than: 500mb
However, since technically the size of all directories themselves are zero this search returns zero results.
Is such a search possible with spotlight or are "power searches" like this only able to be done via the terminal?

If you put the search window into List view (I tinkered with a plist so this is my default view for search windows) and have the column for Size enabled (should be by default, if not do View->Show View Options), then do a search on Kind: Folder and click on the Size column it will list all the folders arranged by size. It is acutally pretty speedy: I have 1500 folders in my Home folder and this was actually much faster than if you use a Finder window with the option to calculate sizes and arrange by Size and mass open the folders.... I'll have to remember this in future! I added it to my Saved Searches, although it didn't save with the Size column checked.
Francine
Schwieder

Problems with Spotlight searching of shared volumes

According to: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html#spotlight, I should be able to "...search any connected Mac with Personal File Sharing enabled or a file server that’s sharing its files."
It doesn't specify what "file server", so I presume it means Spotlight should be able to search any mounted shared volume (assuming, of course, that indexing has been enabled).
I have a NAS device that I want to be able to search with Spotlight. According to mdutil, the volume is enabled for indexing, but I don't see any results when I search under "Shared" in Finder via Cmd+F. (I checked, and there's no .Spotlight folders on the volume.)
From what I recall, under Tiger you could manually specify a network volume to index, but if you dismounted the volume, you'd have to re-enable indexing on next mount. This worked for other file systems (such as Fat32 & NTFS), as well as for HFS+ drives.
According to mdutil in Leopard, the volume is still enabled for indexing even across dismounts. The NAS drive is not HFS+ formatted, but uses XFS.
I've tried deleting the index, to no avail.
Has anyone successfully used Spotlight to search mounted volumes on volumes not shared via another Mac?
Am I missing something?

You have not missed anything.... Leopard promises but does NOT deliver.
I use an AFP server with Bonjour enabled. And NO NO NO Spotlight search is possible on this network volume...
This is outrageous and FALSE information....
Oh and - that Leopard is Sporting 300 new features is false info too.... Not even the "What is New in Leopard" says anything about 300 features.. But it sounds great doesn't it....

Searching for scripts with Spotlight

I decided to ask this question on this forum because AppleScripters are the most likely to search for scripts with Spotlight.
*First, here’s what seems to be the normal behavior of Spotlight:*
If I open the folder “/Users/pierre/Documents/Loisirs/Informatique/Utilisation avancée/AppleScript”, type ⌘F and enter “Kind is Other” and “script” as the search criterion, I get 89 items in the +Searching “AppleScript”+ window.
On the other hand, if I replace the previous criterion with “File extension is scpt”, I get 88 items in the +Searching “AppleScript”+ window, which is normal since one of my scripts is a script bundle, whose extension is “scptd”.
Next, if I open my home folder, type ⌘F again and enter “Kind is Other” and “script” as the search criterion, I get 110 items in the +Searching “pierre”+ window, which again is normal since many of my scripts are outside of my “AppleScript” folder.
*Now, here’s what looks like a bug:*
If I replace the previous criterion with “File extension is scpt” in my home folder, I get only 3 items (instead of 109) in the +Searching “pierre”+ window, which obviously is nonsense.
I have rebuilt permissions and reindexed Spotlight, without any difference.
Any explanation?

Hi Pierre
Not a explanation, but a possible solution, try some of these ideas:::
1) Restart Mac
2) Rebuild the spot light index manually (I no you said you have done this, this is just a path to follow):
a) launch terminal
b) type this sudo mdutil -E /
c) type in your admin password when prompted
d) rebuilding index should commence (could take a while)
3) clear the spot light caches and prefs:
a) download "Yasu" from here and install
http://jimmitchelldesign.com/yasu/
b) enable "Reset System Prefs", "Clear System font Cache", "Clear local font cache", "Clear user font cache"
click ok
c) Restart Mac
4) Kill the SystemUIServer:
a) launch activity monitor, find process "SystemUIServer" highlight then click button quit process
hope this helps
Budgie

Searching work servers with Spotlight

Having issues with Spotlight, it seems to be working fine locally but cannot retrieve the files and folders required from any servers that we have in our office, which is frustrating when looking for older files on our Archive etc...
Is there a preference that I need to click on to allow this?
Any help would be appreciated,
Thanks.
G5 Apple Mac Mac OS X (10.4.8)

First of all, Tiger's Spotlight technology is not intended for Window servers. (See below)
Spotlight Support for Network Homes
"Perform a Spotlight search on network-based Home directories in addition to searching local hard drives."
Leopard will expand to search on servers running Mac OS X Leopard Server. http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/spotlight.html
"The Spotlight store retains information that the plug-ins extract in two separate indexes: one for metadata and the other for content. This provides important performance benefits, because Spotlight doesn’t waste time looking through its massive content index unless specifically requested. Each index is created on a per-volume basis, which means each disk or partition carries its own set of indexes for the information on that volume.
Spotlight works with most locally mounted volumes that can be read and written to, including FireWire and USB/ flash drives. Some volumes, such as Windows-formatted drives, are not indexed automatically. You can change this easily by opening the Info window for the volume in the Finder." http://images.apple.com/macosx/pdf/MacOSXSpotlightTB.pdf
For sure if you are searching network drives, use Command-f and make sure that the drive (volume) you are searching in is shared (connected) and selected. Keep in mind that the volume you are searching in may not be indexible, e.g., CDs, but can be searched using the (old) Find command.

Searching inside PDFs ... maybe even with spotlight?

Does anybody know of an application that lets me archive and search all my paper bound documents?
While there are some applications on Windows (such as ScanSnap) I've not seen anything on the Mac. The workflow I have in mind is to scan a document and then somehow being able to search for words in that document - but with no manual tagging - ideally with spotlight.
Any suggestions?

Thanks for your input so far. I realize that .pdfs are just images, so please let me elaborate.
In more technical terms, what I'm looking for is this:
A utility that scans to .pdf and then runs the document through its OCR engine. It then adds the full text of the .pdf to the file as spotlight comments. This would preserve the original layout and yet make its content searchable without manual tagging.

How do I search for just a folder with Spotlight

How do I search for a folder with Spotlight, not a file? Spotlight is a great tool for finding a file, but often I just want to locat a folder.
When I find a file, how to I see the path to this file?
These are probably obvious question for longtime Mac users, but I come from the Windows world.

Activate the Finder's window. Put the folder name in the search field in the Finder's toolbar. Enter COMMAND-F which should change the Finder's window and give a toolbar above the column headers:
If you click on the dropdown menu with "Any" you will see this:
Select the "Folder" entry.

Search inside Coldfusion files with Spotlight?

I've recently found to my dismay that you cannot search inside .cfm files with Spotlight, and there appears to be no easy way to tell Spotlight to start looking in those files. I would assume that since they're just text files, and Spotlight does seem to search inside .htm files, that it shouldn't be too difficult to get Spotlight to do this, but I'm at a loss as to going about it.
Can anybody point me in the right direction?
Thanks.

For Spotlight to index content there has to be an mdimporter for that content type. If the files are in fact plain text, it is possible to do a bit of hacking to get them indexed, see this discussion at MacOSXHints:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050514182520714&query=mdimport
Be sure to read the comments! And don't do it without a current clone of your system on an external drive that is NOT attached when you try this out (if you do try it).
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

What's with Spotlight?

I've never cared much for Spotlight, which is way overkill for my needs some 95% of the time. In 10.4 it was dog slow also, so I used EasyFind. In 10.5 it's faster, so I've been using Spotlight, though it's annoying that I have to manually switch to 'Search: File Name" every time I open it.
Lately, however, I've been getting the feeling it isn't giving me complete results, that I know there are items on my computer that fit the search term(s) but that aren't appearing in the list. I just tried a search for "Ron Cobb", a favorite 60s cartoonist some of whose work I know I downloaded a while back. Spotlight showed nothing. So I went looking myself, and indeed there was a folder named "Ron Cobb" with a bunch of files in it, including a couple whose names also contain "Ron Cobb".
I have my MBP's internal HD divided into three partitions: one (16GB) for the OS and applications, one (8GB) for my data (documents I've created), one (160+GB) for everything else. The items I was looking for are on the third volume. I tried Spotlight searches for some other items on this volume; some (actually only one) showed in the results, most (a dozen or so) did not.
I use Spotless to turn Spotlight indexing off for several external disks I use for backup and other purposes. According to Spotless, indexing is on for this third volume on my internal HD, and indeed its Spotlight index takes up some 215MB. But Spotlight doesn't give me any (or hardly any) results for this volume.
What's the point of a universal search utility that can't be relied on to find what you know is there?

It's possible somehow the indexes on that volume have been corrupted.
I'd suggest going to the Spotlight config preference, adding that volume to the privacy pane for a couple seconds, and then removing it. Spotlight will rebuild the index for that volume.
I've had what you mention occur maybe twice in the past 3 years with Spotlight, and rebuilding the index has resolved it both times.

Finding file with Spotlight

How do I find a file with Spotlight? Or, more to the point, why does Spotlight make it soooo hard to find the location of files?
Example: I want to find file "foo.xls". I type in "foo.xls" into Spotlight and sure enough, there it is! Great! Er .. but wait. All Spotlight lets me do is OPEN the file. I don't want to do that, I just want to know where it is; what folder it is in.
How do I do that? I can't right-click on items in the Spotlight result list (why not? isn't this what most users would do?). I can't press spacebar for quicklook. I can't seem to do ANYTHING with Spotlight EXCEPT open the file.
I presume there is some hidden shortcut key involving some obscure combination of option+command etc etc, but how am I supposed to know that? Isn't this supposed to be easy?
This is, to say the least, very frustrating.
--Tim

In 10.6 and prior, the user would need only hover over the item in Spotlight's results and a yellow flag would appear with the location. In 10.7, a new Spotlight feature emerged, the preview, so the yellow flag is gone.
Use Finder's Spotlight instead in the upper right of the Finder window. You can always use Finder's "Show Path Bar" view, so that, after doing a Finder Spotlight search, you can single click on a file and see the path listed at the bottom of the window.

What has happened with Spotlight? Can't find files anymore. Why?

Apparently I have two iPhoto libraries. When I use Spotlight to find them, I get an iPad user guide as the first return. One library is in Pictures. If I search that Finder folder for iTunes Library, search finds nothing. If I search that folder for iPhoto it returns iPhoto Slideshows, a file that follows after the iPhoto library file. If I use Spotlight, it returns hundreds of unrelated files. Not useful.
If I double-click the library in Pictures, I get this message in iPhoto: Do you want to switch the current iPhoto Library from “iPhoto Library” to “iPhoto Library” and relaunch iPhoto?
I suspect if I do, I'll never find the library that is now open. How'd I get two libraries? I didn't do that.
My main question: Why doesn't Spotlight return the location of the file I'm looking for?
Seems to me I've been finding files very efficiently with Spotlight for years, but this new version is almost useless.

Yes, I've done that. I just did it again in response your suggestion. Had a fusion disk problem s few days ago; had to wipe it and restore so I'm working with a clean system. Should have been indexed... I dropped my whole hard disk in the privacy space; nothing happened. Then I dropped iMac Home; I could see it was indexing. But nothing changed...
Today the problem was searching for a library and I wondered if Spotlight is coded to not find such Apple created fundamentals.... But daily, no matter what I'm searching for, even if I find it, it is not as efficient as it used to be.
Maybe I'm just a grouchy old man, but it seems to me Spotlight was better before it was improved.

"Alias not found" when opening a non-alias folder with Spotlight

Good morning everyone,
I'm noticing a strange behaviour when browsing through the finder. When I go to a folder (for example, /Users/AeroCross/Dropbox) I have various subfolders. I press CmdShiftF (find by filename) to search for a folder (for example Dropbox/Work/Informs). When the folder "Today" appears in the serach results, I double-click it to enter, then this message appears: http://cl.ly/4wXm - notice that the folder "Informs" is NOT an alias (and there are no aliases around, neither, I don't use them).
It happens with any subfolder folder I search with Spotlight. Can anyone reproduce this problem? Anyone has a solition or something?
P.S: Fix alias does nothing. It just closes the dialog window and that's it. Either way, the error won't reproduce until a later time.

Yeah, there were some problems with this earlier, pre-Snow, but now it is a constant problem, and a very strange one. As I recall, the earlier problem happened with all sorts of things, not just folders. AFAIK the easiest work-around is to select the folder, then at the bottom of the search window you'll see the path to the selected item. Double click the folder there and it should open just fine. Also, very weirdly indeed, if you double click the folder it actually DOES open, but the error box appears on top of it, and when you dismiss it the Finder window returns to its previous state, however if you go to the Finder Go menu item, and select "Recent Folders" the folder you just opened but couldn't access is listed! You can access it just fine from there.
It happens with any subfolder folder I search with Spotlight.
I have not been able to determine what "rule" determines which folders won't open. Some folders returned in a search window will open just fine, others in the same search results window don't. Also, once you have opened the folder thru other means (using the path at the bottom of the window, or the Recent Folders menu), it will then open directly from the search window with a double click.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

Is tagging files necessary with Spotlight?

I'm an attorney, so I save a lot of case law on my computer. They are usally PDFs. I've thought about adding tags to the files so that I can search certain legal terms. However, the legal terms (the tags I would use) are all words and phrases that are used within the files. With Spotlight I can just type the word or phrase and the files using them show up in the search result without the file ever having been tagged. If all that I'm ever searching are these words or phrases that are already used within the file, would there be any benefit to tagging these files with the words or phrases?

X423424X wrote:
On the subject of spotlight tags
(1) Let's get one thing straight. (I thought I had done that when I wrote "edit a PDF in Acrobat".) We're not talking Spotlight tags (even if they exist). We're talking PDF tags. These are read and understood by any app which understands the PDF document information dictionary (see PDF Reference, 6th edition, §10.2.1), which is the most basic level (we'll ignore metadata streams). These stay with the document, and get carried over with the document; which means not only that they'll be understood by any properly designed PDF manager, but that they will be used also on Windows, Linux, and so on. IOW, the investment of work on tagging these files is not only not tied to Spotlight, it is not even tied to Mac OS X. Hence, definitely worth doing, AFAIC.
Personally I don't waste my time remembering various properties spotlight can use
(2) À chacun son goût, maître. (I find that it's not remembering that takes time -- faster hard drive, maybe?) The point of the little trick was answering the OP's question, ie, using Spotlight to search for PDF tags only. As to remembering, well, there are such things as saved searches and 'smart folders'. Moreover, anyone who can handle the spelling and pronunciation of sundry Anglo-Norman juicy bits like "avowtry", "postremogeniture", "nuncupative will", or "writ of oyer & terminer" will hardly have a coughing fit over two measly kMDItem keywords, now will he?
I use spotlight for basic filename
(3) IMHO, that's exactly where SL falls very short; but, to each his own. As anyone who's read my posts knows, I can hardly be described as a fan of SL. In my case, 99% of my searches are of filenames, and, unfortunately, there's no replacement for SL that fits my needs. None of the three apps I use on a regular basis (John R Chang's Find File, Thomas Tempelmann's FindAnyFile, and Christian Grünenberg's EasyFind) are a complete replacement for the Find utility in Panther. As to my PDFs, I manage those with EndNote. I don't recommend it (it's really not a PDF manager at all), but I have a lot of data in it and haven't found yet something worth converting to. But I'm not a lawyer; if I were, I'd certainly take a very close look at DevonThink.
On the subject of spotlight tags, although I never use them, there's even a utility for them as well. It's called TagIt.
(4) I would urge some degree of caution when considering TagIt. It's not a "spotlight tags" utility (in fact, are there any "spotlight tags", other than comments?); it's really part of OpenMeta; the developer, Ironic Software, lately seems missing in action, and Yep, their foremost product, hasn't been updated in quite some time. Unlike PDF metadata, OpenMeta is not cross-platform and it is not transferable.

Searching TC with Spotlight

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